A Father’s Day Reading List

Stories from The Hairpin, Buzzfeed, The New York Times Magazine, and more.

Since this Sunday is Father’s Day, we’ve rounded up ten of our favorite narratives about fathers from Catapult’s archives and from around the web. Whether you’ll be celebrating the holiday or deliberately ignoring it, these nuanced essays tell stories of identity, family, and the complexities of human connection.

After writing his father into his fiction as a character for years, Peter Orner confronts the reality of his father’s death for Buzzfeed.

In “The Half Dad,” Chelsea G. Summers tells the story of two fathers: the man who raised her and the man whose name appears on her birth certificate.

At Longreads, Alysia Abbott reflects on her upbringing in San Francisco with her openly gay father in the decades following Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love.

“But how does a six-year-old boy tell his father to love him better, to give him more?” Mensah Demary on writing his first story on his father’s word processor.

When Chris Offutt needed braces as a child, his father did whatever was necessary to afford them—becoming the “king of 20th-century written pornography.”

After spending her adolescence a continent away from her father, Saskia Vogel finds connection to her father through their shared love of mangos.

“We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.” Sasha Sagan writes for The Cut about growing up with Carl Sagan as her father.

When her father forbid her from following her dream of becoming an actress, Soniah Kamal discovered writing—and learned to create her own narrative.

Bodies, borders, and names: Maya Binyam writes about growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her Ethiopian father for The Hairpin.

“I was afraid that I would never believe in anything again.” Nadia Owusu on ritual, grief, and mourning the death of her father.